


Ours Was Just A Little Sorrowed Talk

by awittyname



Category: Rizzoli & Isles
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post 3x01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 22:14:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18040046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awittyname/pseuds/awittyname
Summary: Well now pride's gone out the window, cross the rooftops, run away...it wasn't her place to apologize, she had her pride, same as Jane. And she won't cry for what she's lost, she will just go on, attempting to redefine the ordinary in her world.





	Ours Was Just A Little Sorrowed Talk

**Author's Note:**

> Even if you have 0 concept of Duran Duran (you need to crawl out from under that rock and discover the amazingness of them, but...), you can still enjoy this, but if you know Duran Duran, you will enjoy this that much more.

The Beacon Hill home had been in her family since it had been built. Stately, originally designed in the 1920s, it had originally belonged to her great uncle. She had, prior to moving in, herself, spent some time in it as a child at holidays, the various family gatherings that had always felt more like formal gatherings than even some of her mother's openings.

In short, prior to taking over the otherwise unused house, it had been a cold, uninviting place. She had done what she could with it. Redesigned as much as she could. Livened up what had been impersonal. But even still, there was that coldness leaking in, that even state of the art windows and new insulation couldn't keep out. An impersonality that could not be escaped.

She had never understood the concept of a _home_ before. She'd had plenty of residences before. Abodes. Dwellings. Dormitories in school. A hut during her time in Medcins Sans Frontiers. A gorgeous Old City loft when she had been doing a postgraduate fellowship. Sprawling country homes with acres of land attached. But while she'd always been able to say _I'm going home_ after a long day she'd never really understood the difference between a house and a home over her nearly four decades in the world.

All that had changed after she had met and befriended Jane. whereas before, her home had simply been somewhere for her to rest her head and prepare meals, once Jane had entered into her life she began to see the differences that separated an address from the more metaphysical concept of _home_ before. It was an unfamiliar, almost foreign feeling. She'd never expierenced homesickness as a child, so frequently had she found herself thrust into new situations, and indeed, the longest she had spent in any one place had been her time in school, where the dormitories had been large and impersonal.

So when she realized that at some point in time the Beacon Hill house had become so much more than a place for her to store her belongings, an address to receive mail at, and had somehow became someplace infused with memories and emotions, it had caught her off guard at first. It wasn't an unpleasant realization, far from it, but she had never walked beneath a transom and felt something warm and pleasant bloom through her. A sort of quiet calm contentedness that had been so unfamiliar at first but had quickly become something she had gotten used to.

And as she walked in from a dreary, rainy Thursday that seemed to never end, the emptiness she felt as she walked through the threshold was nearly overwhelming. So used had she gotten to a seemingly never ending stream of Rizzolis floating through her house to have that suddenly missing-it left the Beacon Hill estate feeling even colder and more impersonal than it had when she had visited it as a child. She'd grown accustomed to Angela puttering around, cooking more than enough to feed whole armies and Tommy and Frankie and Jane appearing at all hours to somehow eat more than small armies. She'd gotten used to finding her couch crowded on a cold Thursday night such as this, since she had been the only one that hadn't blinked twice at the cost of the NFL Network and simply added the channel to her cable bill without a second thought. After all, she certainly didn't mind her home taking over for the now defunct Rizzoli family home.

Except it wasn't anymore. And that couldn't have been more apparent as she turned on the lights, followed by the television and then even the stereo as nothing seemed to make up for the cacophonous noise that a handful of other, living people could make. And even as she mechanically opened the pantry, reaching for a few ingredients to prepare a routine meal, she found that everything felt haunted by a shadow of something that she couldn't place. Everything felt off, wrong. Even though, logically, she knew everything was exactly where it had been two weeks prior, everything _felt_ out of place. Everything felt as though there was a memory just out of reach tied to it.

It had been all of two weeks. She reminded herself over and over again that this too, would pass. That like everything else that had come into her life it was bound to have faded away eventually. Everything eventually faded out on her. The difference between this and her relationship with her adoptive parents, between this and her relationship with Garret Fairfield, her relationship with Ian, with anyone close to her in her life was that this one had ended with a bang and not a whimper. She was used to the gradual decline,the distance put between herself and others. Not out and out fights leading to a sudden severance of things she had never appreciated before but had now come to view as normal. She was used to not having a deep enough relationship with someone to even be concerned with no longer having them in her life.

But Jane was different. From the start, from when they had first met, Jane had been different. She had been at first intrigued by a woman she had met at originally while Jane was undercover, only to run into her again, some six hours later, this time in normal attire, gun and badge firmly in place. After apologizing about the misconception, they'd laughed about it, and the first stirrings of a tenuous friendship was formed. It had only strengthened a few months later when Jane had transferred from the drug unit to homicide, and they started seeing each other far more often. And then casual workplace acquaintances became proper _friends_ in the weeks after a gruesome end to a evening in a cold farmhouse. She was the only one who didn't look at Jane any different after all, she'd never had any reason to. The detective was the same detective, albeit a little more surly, sarcastic and closed off.

And slowly that bond had strengthened into something she'd never felt before. She wasn't even sure how to describe it. It wasn't the heady, intense, passion that she had felt for Garret or Ian. It wasn't the warm comfort she felt towards those that had raised her, nor the warm gratitude she felt towards Angela, nor the safe, calm feeling that blossomed with thoughts of Frankie, Barry or Vince, nor even the curious, protective feelings she had for Tommy. No, what she felt for Jane was all of those things and also so much more.

She had always believed that there were two kinds of love: the platonic aloofness that she felt towards her family - the sort of love where one would grieve their passing, but only because it would be an interruption to one's comfort zone; and the romantic, passionate feelings she'd had for past lovers - the sort where one never wants to be apart because the chemicals and hormones produced by them are literally addicting, and the human desire for companionship was overwhelming. And then Jane had gone and blurred all the lines. What she felt for Jane wasn't the intense sexual desire she'd had for past boyfriends, but yet the desire for companionship felt fulfilled. She'd always thought that people who said that their significant other _completed them_ had always seemed foolish before. Until she found that she was thinking, was feeling exactly that towards.

And it was something so new, so foreign to her, she had originally labeled it as abnormal - something to be studied and tested and examined. Until she had studied it enough, tested it enough, spent so much time examining it that she had become, in her own fashion, the mad scientist, so absorbed in their singular focus that this abnormal feeling had become her life. This foreign concept of love had somehow become her normal, and the extraordinary had become ordinary.

And like the mad scientist so wrapped up in their magnum opus, to no longer have that singular focus, she felt oddly adrift, the life that she recognized having seeming vanished in front of her. She had her job to focus on, of course, and had largely thrown herself into work over the last two weeks. The first had been out of necessity - less than thirty six hours as the Acting Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been more than enough time for Pike to cause enough damage that she would be cleaning up his messes for months to come. But this past week, with the worst of the fires firmly suppressed was entirely because she wasn't quite sure what else to do, and because it gave her an excuse to avoid the empty house that seemed nothing more than a vessel for memories that were imprinted on seemingly ever item in it.

It was the deepest friendship she had ever had, it had stirred things in her that she had thought herself incapable of feeling. Years ago - _had it really been that long?_ \- before they had nearly been separated by a foolish action and six hours of surgery, she had thought herself as cold and emotionless as a serial killer. Jane had fought her on that belief tooth and nail. Insisted that she was in no way like that. Now, now she knew for a fact that she wasn't. She was, in fact yet another ordinary human in an ordinary world. And yet another person allowing themselves to get lost in melancholy thoughts as they mechanically diced celery and onions, easy, routine repetitive motions that allowed her mind to wander.

She attempted - she did, really, try - to avoid such thoughts. They were silly, pointless, there was little to no point in grieving something as silly as both of their hubris. this wasn't a death, this wasn't some grievous injury, this was far from a tragedy, their was no point in dwelling on it, shedding tears for it. After all, she was just as responsible for this. she could, if she so desired, go beg forgiveness, claim that she was in the wrong, grovel on her knees and pretend to put all this behind them.

But Maura Isles, if she had nothing else, had her dignity. She would not beg forgiveness for something that she felt no remorse for. And while pride goeth before the fall, she had every right to be cross with Jane. It wasn't even so much the shooting of Paddy Doyle, it was everything that had happened after the shock of that had worn off that had gotten her more angry than she had ever been before. Their first meeting in the hospital hadn't been any words of compassion or concern, but a self serving visit to warn her of Internal Affairs getting involved. It was her spending the night before in the hospital, while Jane was with Dean - she'd at least had the decency to wait until Jane was well on the way to recovery before she started seeing Byron. It was Jane enforcing the fact that she was not family, that she was once again the outsider, while Jane forcefully pulled Angela away, at a moment when she so desperately needed the comfort of a mother - and unable to even have the awkward aloofness of Constance. It was the half-hearted attempt to make things better by showing her her supposed grave, the reason why her biological mother had never once inquired about her.

In the moments that she had needed a friend, someone to be able to turn to and rely on the most, she suddenly found herself devoid of them. And she'd be damned if she'd be the one to apologize for that. She had _needed_ Jane, and Jane was nowhere to be found. That was Jane's place to apologize. Jane was the one firmly in the wrong. And they both were too damn proud to put all this behind them. And until Jane was finally able to swallow that pride, this was going to continue. No, she was going to get used to this, there was no point in crying about what was said and done, there was no point in moping about something she knew would not change. Because if nothing else, Jane Rizzoli was just as proud as she was, and had an even harder time admitting to being in the wrong.

It was their pride that had driven this wedge between them, pride that had pried them apart. This was something that either of them could end, but she would not concede to something she was justified in. She was right to be mad at Jane. And she wasn't about to be the one to cave in just because. She could be stubborn just as well as Jane could. And she was not going to give in to shedding tears for someone who had been the one to wrong her.

She had been so used to being alone for so much of her life. This was no different. It had been foolish to even let herself get so entangled with another person in the first place. Interpersonal relationships were never her strength. Being on her own was what she had grown accustomed to as the normal state of things. These last few years had been a simple aberration. She had done just fine for more than thirty years, and she'd continue to do fine for the next sixty. She would find her way back to the normal state of things soon enough.

After all, the world was far larger than her and her utterly banal problems. The news ticked away stories of things much greater than herself and her own selfish problems. There were people out there killing dozens of others over senseless declarations of who was wrong and who was righteous. There were people remorselessly bilking hundreds of others out of life savings. In the greater scheme of things, their argument, the way had so effectively severed each other from their lives, it was nothing at all, and meant nothing. She had loved Sagan as a child, for reminding her that she was so infinitesimal compared to the rest of the universe. She was but another life on pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The world would continue to turn, the sun would continue to rise, and the tides would still ebb and flow. She would wake up tomorrow, and still be the same as she was.

No, there was no point in being upset, tearful over this. She was used to being alone, that was the normal, ordinary state of things. This had simply been an aberration, an abnormality, and she'd forget all about it quickly enough. Compartmentalize it away. A reminder of why she never got close to people. A reminder that casual acquaintances were better than friends, more reliable, more predictable. She would continue to survive, because that was the way the world worked. There was no point in crying over their pride, over what had transpired, over their little, silly fight, there was only going forward, making this, the cold impersonality the ordinary again.


End file.
